


Aphelion

by Sylvestris



Category: Breaking Bad, True Detective
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Crash Era, Crossover, Gen, Organized Crime, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:24:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4845719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You'd better watch your step, little girl. Here be dragons."</p><p>(Houston, 1990.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aphelion

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on a headcanon by [rainuponthemoon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rainuponthemoon). Credit to [teethwax](http://archiveofourown.org/users/teethwax) for the name of Crash's handler.

The thief lies curled on the asphalt, his arms contorted around the split shell of his skull. He’s not struggling much any more, not making much sound, and Rust doesn’t have to work very hard to hold him down. The young dealer he robbed stands a few yards away, flanked by two lieutenants, knotting the cuffs of her jacket in her hands. It’s easier for Rust to keep his eyes on her; he drank a few ounces of cough syrup in order to come down earlier and there’s too much dissociative in his system for him to be able to look at the ground and not see it rippling like water. The man beneath them is becoming slick and shifting around the edges, transfiguring, and reduced to blood and bone like this he could be anyone.

Rust is starting to feel like he’s always been here and so have they, like what’s happening here is so _dense_ that it has warped spacetime into a pit he can’t see out of. An astronaut travelling into a black hole, he read once, would experience time passing slower and slower, until to observers they would appear frozen. Ever since he went undercover he’s been sinking, and here, he thinks, here, now, is a good place to sink. A city that’s nothing if not honest about the chemicals it runs on. Above them, the sky is roiling. The air is liquid with petrichor, a simmering green.

One of the men aims another kick at the thief’s jaw, as if he weren’t beyond comprehending anything they could possibly do to him now. The girl— she’s fifteen years old, knock-kneed and about four foot ten, Little Princess is all they've called her— lets out a whimper, and her head jerks to the side. Ginger’s boss Joe grabs her around the waist, pins her shoulders, and forces her head forward so she can see.

“Hey,” he says, his mouth close to her ear. "This is for you." Another kick, another crack.

“I— I don’t want—”

“Did I ask what you wanted?” Joe growls. The girl shakes, her teeth bared.

“Will you show us some fucking respect?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“See, this is for you. This is so people know they don’t mess around with you, understand?” His voice turns on a dime, goes soft, paternal, comforting. Rust finds it as repulsive as anything else he’s ever done. “See, I bet he thought— I bet he thought, ‘there goes that pretty little girl, she ain’t gonna put up a fight. She ain’t gonna hurt me.’”

The thief groans, a thick, clotted sound, and the girl’s eyes start to roll back in her head. Joe shakes her.

“You gotta let ‘em know, princess, if somebody steps to you, you gotta let ‘em know what’ll happen.”

She nods until he lets go of her, satisfied, and stalks back to his bike. As he and his lieutenants melt away, the girl stands rooted to the spot, gaping at the man on the ground. Rust tries to remember which of them brought her here.

“You got someplace you need to be?” Rust asks. She shakes her head, misunderstanding. He jerks his chin towards his car.

They travel maybe five hundred yards before she begs him to pull over. Bone white, she stumbles out of the car before he’s cut the engine, bends forward at the waist and starts heaving. Rust follows, reaches for the scruff of her neck and holds back her hair. He can’t think of a reason not to. He’s not sure Crash would do the same, but there’s no one around to see and Crash has been slippery lately. Less a discrete consciousness and more something like a skin. He’s struck by the fragile way her skull feels under his hands, the damp softness of her short black hair, and wonders when he last touched someone other than to compel them.

“Oh, my God…” the girl moans, wiping her eyes and mouth.

Rust hauls her up by an elbow, and her small hands dig into his sleeves for balance. So tiny, she still gives the impression of having longer limbs than she knows what to do with. Her feet skid for purchase on the sodden ground and she wavers, dizzy. Her eyes are moving too much.

This will happen to her again, and again, and again. This will be the making of her, or it will turn her into the person she always has been.

Later, he’ll tell Morales about her in one of his brief, slanting windows of focus, and Morales will furrow his brow and give him the _well, that’s very sad, but what do you expect me to do about it?_ look, and list a few acronyms supposed to take responsibility for the city’s thousands of vulnerable children, and that will be that.

“Are they mad at me?” she asks, sniffling.

“Those assholes back there? Naw. Just trying to make a point.”

Back in the car, she chatters, terrified. She asks him two more times if she’s in trouble, if they’re going to hurt her. A story of sorts comes out: she thought she could sell more crystal among the warehouses of Denver Harbor and the Ship Channel than where she was supposed to be working, and on the fifth day she got jumped. She shows him a map she drew of the area, unlabeled but coherent, in a spiral-bound composition book with the NASA logo on the cover and _Lydia_ written guilelessly on the upper corner in neat, looping cursive. Crosses indicate the rail yard, the MTA depot, businesses of interest. A sinuous line describes the bayou.

“What do you want, a fucking gold star?” he mutters, but it’s not bad.

“I’m already bringing back hundreds more per day than I was in Greenspoint,” Lydia says, like she thinks she’s bulletproof. “Joe can’t argue with that, right?”

“I don’t reckon he will, but the Mexicans might have something to say about it. You’d better watch your step, little girl.” He taps the page with a fingertip. “Here be dragons.”

Lydia fixes her gaze on the horizon, where an alien cluster of skyscrapers forces its way up through endless flatness.

“Tell me,” Rust says, “if somebody's fixin’ to hurt you, what do you do?”

Lydia peers back at him, eyes wide, biting her lip.

“I run,” she says, with utter certainty.

He stops in a quiet neighborhood near the Galleria to let her out, and watches for a moment as his headlights catch her face, her flickering hands, the white soles of her sneakers. She runs like a bird flies.


End file.
